Now. When I exercise, my target heart rate according to The Walking Site is seventy percent (that's about 120 bpm for me).

Now, let's say I jog around Meursault maintaining 70%. And say I do that for one hour - sixty minutes.

You often hear things like "if you do such-and-such for 25 mins, that's the equivalent of two slices of wonderbread..." (in other words, you burn up as much energy/fat as you would gain by eating the food in question - or in other words by merely not eating the food serving in question, you've "achieved as much" as the exercise in question).

So my question. If one works out at 70% target heart rate, for one hour, what's the "equivalent" in terms of milliliters of Meursault white wine?

1 Answer
1

Running at 120 bpm for 1 hour for someone who's overweight would probably equate to 500 Calories. It depends on your pace and weight whether this accurate.

Assuming the calories in your bottle of Meursault is about 90 Calories per 100 ml = 90*7 = 630 Calories

500 - 630 = -130 Calories

What does this tell us? Alcohol is a huge source of Calories, so much that its almost impossible for most of us to exercise enough to compensate for a night of drinking. My advice, if you really want to drink wine, cut your meals down to something light for that day to compensate for the Calorie difference.

[Ed] So for the "hour equivalent": It's about 500 calories for the 1 hour of exercise described. 90 Calories per 100 ml of wine. Hence, the answer is 500/90

Ethanol is 7 calories per gram, and that bottle seems to be 13% alcohol, so it's actually ~680 calories (even worse than your estimate)!
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VPericJul 9 '11 at 15:55

Its balanced out by a poor estimation of his workout @VPeric, but that's an interesting way of calculating it! :-)
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Ivo Flipse♦Jul 9 '11 at 16:29

@Ivo -- hi Ivo! Again thank you so very much for taking the time to show how to calculate this. Also, I was trying to calculate "how much wine, "per" hour of exercise..." (sorry, I should not have mentioned the bottle size - that is not relevant). So I just added a note expressing it that way. It's interesting that generally it's "fairly close to one bottle," roughly speaking. One hour of hard jogging in the vines ... all you've "saved" is drinking one bottle. Well worth remembering. Again thank you so very much.
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Joe BlowJul 10 '11 at 7:14

1

@Ivo @Vperic an interesting question is, in a sports lab (or wherever) in fact how do you calculate EXACTLY how many calories someone is "burning" during effort? how is that done, really? Perhaps it should be a whole other question.
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Joe BlowJul 10 '11 at 7:16

It should be a whole other question, though I think we already had one. Either way, you can simply estimate these things by keeping track of how much energy you consume and expend. If you still gain weight, there's an error somewhere and you correct your model.
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Ivo Flipse♦Jul 10 '11 at 8:54